Creativity – fake it ’till you make it?

Teaching students to be creative is difficult. If they don’t think they’re very good at it they feel shut off by it, as though it’s a skill you either have or you don’t.

To make it harder still, there’s a number of things which hinder these students in accessing their creativity.

In the teaching of English, we’re always looking at the work of our classic writers. We analyse in detail why the writing is great, explain the hidden meanings and the cultural relevance. But, rarely is the painful, arduous, creative process that went into it explored in more than just a side-note. The fact that these writers all dealt with struggle, self-doubt, confusion, and often (quite frankly) “faking it” before the completing the thing we’re reading is forgotten in our analysis of its construction.

Without meaning to, we are perpetuating the idea that creativity flows effortlessly. Which is, unsurprisingly, demeaning for our students who find it hard.

They can find the idea that they need to work, develop, and practise creativity a surprise. Then they are insulted by the suggestion that they should edit it, as though once it’s done that’s it – when in fact many creatives talk of their work as being a process that’s never truly finished, they’re always editing it.

Here’s the first page of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol – if editing’s good enough for him, then our students can do it:

Secondly, how often do we talk about the idea that creativity is really borrowing ideas from other people? You’re just putting your own angle, view or slant on an idea that already exists.

In the classroom we look at these great works in isolation as though they appeared fully formed in the writer’s mind. In English we study Shakespeare, but we rarely talk about his contemporaries, the people that he admired, those that inspired him to write.

The idea of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was borrowed from Arthur Brooke’s 1562 work The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.

Is creativity really borrowing ideas from other people and developing them into your own?